Preemptive Retaliation

I got sick once when I was a kid. I can’t remember why, but it was bad enough to keep me off school but not too bad that I couldn’t follow my mum during her chores. She took me up the shopping centre and probably relented my eternal pleas to visit the toy store. There, right at the front, they had an N64 installed with Mario 64 playing on it. I had known it was there for a while, but never had the opportunity to play it myself. But this was mid-morning on a Wednesday, a school day, and there wasn’t another kid in sight. My young, sickness addled mind went wild and the ten minutes I spent playing that thing felt like an eternity. I remember it was Cool, Cool Mountain, and I couldn’t figure out how to do a damn thing but still having the time of my life.

A few years later, but still almost twenty years ago, I was being dragged round a Toys R Us by my mum, who was doing her best to corral two children through a figurative cave of wonders. I don’t remember the exact circumstance, but I think we were there to get me new bike. That is, until I saw the installed N64 in the videogame section with a copy of Banjo-Kazooie. While my mum went in search for my suddenly missing brother, I spent ten minutes on the first level of this game running and jumping, and I was immediately hooked. I talked to my mum about it, and I distinctly remember her asking whether I wanted a new bike or this videogame (a cost saving I didn’t appreciate until I was much older). I begged for Banjo-Kazooie, pleaded for it. It was the first game I ever hundred percented, which was done over a few days with the flu.

This week, whilst off work in the grip of food poisoning, I finished the new Zelda. I finished it after putting it off for as long as I could. I finished a lot of the main quests, a huge amount of the shrines and side quests, and had gotten to the point where the game literally told me “Well done, it’s time to fight the big boss NOW, you better do it NOW, right NOW, because that’s the point of all this!”. I then spent the next ten hours running through the scenery, collecting precious rocks and ores to upgrade my special armour into more special armour. The world was ending and I needed to save the day from a big evil demon, but man first I needed to collect fifty pieces of wood and give it to this guy so he could build a town and get married and that is MORE IMPORTANT.

The internet has been gushing about this game since the moment it came out, and I don’t think anything else I can write can do it as much justice as others have. The only thing I can do is add to that endless praise. I love this game. I have spent hours and hours traversing its scenery, fighting its battles and overcoming its ramping challenges. The only way I can describe it is that, whilst playing this, I have experienced something akin to sheer joy. It was the joy of playing a game and having fun with it. The only time this wasn’t the case was when I was nearing the end of a solid 8 hour session, and my mind was burned out from the feedback loop of reward. But then the next day I did the same again.

For so much of the game I sat with my stomach floating, eager to find out what came round the next corner. It was like those moments when I was younger, when I found something so immeasurably interesting and engaging that I just had to keep playing it, before I understood the tropes and expectations of a good adventure game. When everything was fresh and exciting. When I first stepped onto Cool, Cool Mountain in Mario, or Mumbo Mountain in Banjo-Kazooie, or even Death Mountain in Ocarina of Time, I didn’t know what to find. I didn’t know about penguin races or fruit throwing apes or strange dancing rock creatures. I just wanted to explore. Breath of the Wild brought that back to me. 

This game encapsulates everything that videogames mean to me. For so many games I’ve sat there, vacant from myself as I engage in the mechanics or the story or whatever. This is the first game in a good long while, where I honestly have not wanted it to end. I did not want it to wrap up and give me a break, or to give me a reason to play something else. I just wanted to keep playing, and keep enjoying it, and keep loving this world that had been set out in front of me.

Ah I want to play it again, right now. I want to do the impossible and start from scratch, and experience the surprise and wonderment all over again.